


any decent rhyme or reason

by NeverNooitNiet



Series: burning and fierce-eyed [2]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, Existential Dread, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 16:39:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18502876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverNooitNiet/pseuds/NeverNooitNiet
Summary: What Crowley wanted more than anything else in the world was for Aziraphale to admit that perhaps they weren’t so different, after all.What he wanted most of all, he could very occasionally admit to himself, was Aziraphale.





	any decent rhyme or reason

**Author's Note:**

> you don't have to have read those golden eyes to read this, but i think they link quite nicely thematically :)

Crowley looked in the mirror at his unfamiliar face, and did his level best not to throw up.

It was a grim business, getting a new corporation. It always felt a little like wearing someone else’s hand-me-down coat: it never fit quite right and always smelled slightly funny and was usually too broad about the shoulders— only in this scenario Crowley supposed that he was the coat, sort of, relentlessly imposing those unshakeable characteristics of his— the scales, the hiss, the eyes— onto whatever face he’d been handed this time.

He still reeked of sulphur. He needed a shower, and then about a week’s worth of sleep, before he could get on with the properly serious business of introducing this body to the joys of alcohol.

And then he’d have to go and see Aziraphale, he supposed. A small, stupidly hopeful part of Crowley very badly wanted to run off to visit the angel that very moment, to collapse into the familiar warmth of the bookshop, the smell of tea and old paper, and, Crowley thought, in a very small, shameful sort of way, the feeling of being _home_ , far more than his own flat had ever given him. The larger, marginally more sensible part of his mind, however, had dimly registered that rushing off to see the angel in his current state was perhaps not the best of plans.

He returned to glaring at his new face. It was— well, it was _fine_ , he supposed, they were all _fine_ , he really ought to stop getting so bloody attached to what was, after all, little more than a glorified uniform. A rented suit. Crowley tapped his fingernails impatiently against the cool porcelain of his sink, let his cheekbones shift ever so slightly upwards and his hair darken until it was properly black, and supposed that ought to do for the moment.

If anyone asked, it was vanity, and therefore Pride, and therefore a sin. But he always felt oddly maudlin after a discorporation, wispy and liable to fade right back out of corporeal existence at any moment, without anyone so much as noticing, and he just needed— control. For something about his appearance to do as it was bloody told.

Sometimes Crowley felt like all he was was yellow eyes and a soft hiss and emptiness and the vague impression of scales, set into a stranger’s face. And it was only natural, then, to try and make that face a little more familiar, because it was amazing, really, how with so few real clear traits to pick from, skin tone and hair and bone structure (and eyes, of course, but that wasn’t really an option for Crowley personally), one could create such an endless tapestry of faces, an infinite number of combinations. And it was so easy to feel… lost.

Ineffable, Aziraphale would say, only Crowley didn’t really want to think about Aziraphale just then.

He did, though, of course. He always did.

And in theory, by all rights, Aziraphale should have been even worse off than Crowley, because he didn’t even have those few distinctive traits, but in practice, Crowley had found that the angel always cultivated a certain sort of aesthetic about himself.  His hair would always tend towards a mess of curls, even if it had previously shown no intention of doing so, and his corporations always tended to be on the plumper side, and he was always very particular in his fashion.

Always about a hundred years out of date, mind you, but particular nevertheless.

And Crowley, who was always, in the end, whatever passed for fashionable at the time, found that he liked them a lot more, those defining characteristics, because they were there out of choice, out of the pedantic mess of Aziraphale’s character. They were Aziraphale, far more than anything about Crowley was really his, even his penchant for dark hair and good looks. It would all change in about a century, anyway.

Except for his eyes.

Aziraphale, of course, had perfectly normal, human-looking eyes, the kind that changed with whatever body he was currently inhabiting, the kind that didn’t get their owner discorportated for the fifth time in a bloody century or even earn them a second glance. Brown and green and blue and grey and brown again. The colours changed, but the intrinsic _Aziraphaleness_ of them, the oddly piercing stare, the age that didn’t quite seem to fit, did not. And for all their apparent normalcy, if the light glinted off them just so, there was… there was something off about his pupils, something that might be mistaken for a brightness, a glow, eerily luminous, almost mirror-like in its quality, silver and shining; but it was a dreadfully subtle thing, for all that, something Crowley had only noticed through a myriad nights of hungry, longing observation, too scared to say a word.

_Subtle_. Crowley’s own eyes, acid yellow from end to end in the harsh bathroom light, snake pupils narrowed to barest slits, were anything but.

Crowley tended to avoid making long eye contact with Aziraphale. He didn’t know why, but something about the apparent normality of those eyes, the humanity of them, juxtaposed with the obvious wrongness of his own, made his deeply uncomfortable.

He didn’t want Aziraphale to be human. He wanted him to _understand_ , to know what it was to see empires rise and fall and everyone you knew, all those fragile people with their tiny lives and their vast hopes and dreams, be devoured by time and vanish into nothingness. To be left behind after all that, and to look in the mirror and see that absolutely nothing had changed, that that same wall of yellow still glared back at you. He wanted Aziraphale to see all the blank stares of shock and hatred he’d gotten over the centuries, the ones from strangers that usually led to beatings and burnings and an impromptu trip Downstairs, or worse, the ones from friends and more-than-friends, as infrequent as those were. The pure revulsion as they realised what he was.

You got used to it, after a while. But it was a terribly lonely burden to bear.

What Crowley wanted more than anything else in the world was for Aziraphale to admit that perhaps they weren’t so different, after all.

What he wanted most of all, he could very occasionally admit to himself, was Aziraphale. Not that that would— could— ever happen.

There was a reason, Crowley thought bitterly, that they called it falling in love.

Sunglasses. Yes. Crowley snapped his fingers and a pair grudgingly materialised in his hands, familiar and solid. He pulled them on with something like relief.

They hadn’t been called sunglasses initially, of course, but tinted lenses had been around in some form or another since about the twelfth century, and Crowley was desperately, pathetically grateful for them, the meagre protection that they offered.

Crowley didn’t hate many things, not in the way that he was supposed to. Sometimes, after a night of drinking on Aziraphale’s sofa, the dim lamplight would frame the angel’s face just so and Crowley’s prickly tangle of emotions, loathe as he was to admit it, would lurch quite sharply in the opposite direction. But that was a hopeless, fairly miserable train of thought, and Crowley quickly pulled himself away from it.

No, Crowley didn’t hate much, or deeply.

But he did hate his eyes.

Well. That was a bit of an oversimplification, he supposed. In the end, it wasn’t about his eyes, or his hiss, or the scales that always found a way to dig through his skin, or even the fact that Crowley didn’t think he’d been really, properly warm since Eden, and he’d been burnt at the stake more times than he could count.

The problem was, really, was what the eyes meant, which was that he could never really _fit_ , never really belong somewhere before someone took notice and started asking questions. That he was always, always hiding, now, always slightly on edge.

There were ways, he supposed, that he could have avoided all that, or reduced his staggeringly large number of discorporations, at any rate. But he’d established certain lines, firm ones, long ago, that he simply would not— could not?— cross. And that was that.

And that was the real problem, wasn’t it? Far more than his eyes. He was a demon. He wasn’t supposed to have lines, or morals. It was a problem that ultimately went back to the very beginning, because there had always been the slight sense that something was wrong, that _he_ was wrong, somehow.

Heaven was… he hadn’t fit there, that had been clear from the start. He couldn’t remember any specifics, of course, couldn’t remember his name or his rank, but he remembered his emotions well enough, a quiet, scared sort of dissatisfaction, a niggling feeling that something wasn't quite right. That what they were doing, perhaps, was not quite right.  That was how he always felt, he supposed, come Heaven or Hell: a small, utterly insignificant cog in a machine. Lost, and unsure of what was going on, and really quite alone.

And then he’d found Lucifer and all that lot, and they hadn’t fit, either, and he’d been so pathetically fucking relieved. And if they’d been surprisingly angry, and surprisingly hateful, and if he’d had any niggling doubts, he’d pushed them down, because he’d really thought that he’d found the group where he belonged. And because then God had made humans, those beautiful, stupid creatures, with their free will and their burning questions, and to begin with Crowley _had_ hated them, sort of, a small and shameful thing. Not like— not because he thought he was better, or anything, but... because he was jealous.  Because he wanted to be like that. To be free. But at the time, to that young, stupid, angel, the two types of hatred had looked near identical, and when the Fall had happened... he hadn’t meant to do it. he’d just seen them, and hoped, passionately, that when he got to the bottom, things would be different, better. And then he’d Fallen. Just like that. Tripped off heaven’s ledge.

It had hurt. Falling. he’d screamed and cried all the way down. And then he’d gotten to Hell and sobbed and thrashed until he couldn’t anymore, and then he’d realised... Hell was just as bad as Heaven, just as claustrophobic and trapping, but while in Heaven you’d at least had Falling, that one choice, that one trump card, in Hell, you were trapped. You couldn’t just unFall. He was a demon, and would be until he died, even if he was awful at it, even worse than he’d been at being an angel.

And the whole time, Crowley was, somewhere deep within the firmament of his being, desperately, miserably lonely.

And when, after Eden, he’d tried to change his shape and been hit with a dizzying blast of cold and yellow eyes that wouldn’t go away, the first thing that Crowley had done was to collapse on the ground and laugh hysterically, because God was a clever bastard, wasn’t She, because this was a punishment, after all, and She’d really just hit the nail on the head. Because Crowley’s biggest fear had always been that otherness, that loneliness, and now he’d never really fit anywhere, no matter how hard he tried.

They hadn’t really known what to do with him after that, back in Hell. Whereas before he’d been a bit standoffish, maybe, now he was clearly, definitively different, and no-one quite knew what to make of him, the little nobody who had always skulked around the outskirts. But demons, on the whole, weren’t terribly creative thinkers, and it had been generally assumed that this would lead to Crowley trying to consolidate more power in Hell. And when he was assigned to Earth, presumably to keep him from doing just that, Crowley couldn’t quite bring himself to feel upset about it.

Crowley didn’t particularly think he was better than the other demons. he certainly wasn’t more angelic, or anything along those lines. If anything, he supposed that his problem was that he just lacked _conviction_. In the Plan. In his superiors. And whatever it was in his that Aziraphale read as goodness, he reckoned was perhaps more of a self-conscious coil of doubt. Because he didn’t really want to make people suffer, because he couldn’t see the bloody _point_ to it, the great celestial tug of war. And Hell, as with everything, was all in favour of doubt when it was directed at Heaven, and came down rather hard on it when it was turned in their direction.

If Crowley had been human, he thought he might have been an atheist.

And he did, still, desperately, stupidly want to be human. Oh, he enjoyed certain things about being a demon, like immortality and miracling up things, and he wasn’t quite sure, if it came down to it, if he’d know how to drive without supernatural aid. But to be human, to have free will, to be able to do what you bloody well wanted, love who you wanted, without Above or Below getting involved— that was what Crowley wanted. To not be a pawn in some great celestial chess game, or to not be so miserably aware of his status as a pawn, at the very least.

Humans, or a depressing majority of them, anyway, spent their whole lives chasing divinity. But the divine— and the diabolical, for that matter— they revolved around humanity, around those strange creatures, their freedom or ineffability, call it what you will. Humans much more closely resembled God than angels or demons, in Crowley’s own unhumble opinion. And none of the stupid buggers even realised it.

He’d never be human, he knew, and would never quite fit with them either, but it was a different sort of not-fitting, which Crowley supposed brought his back to the problem of his eyes. He tried desperately to keep up, to always be whatever was in fashion, whatever was _normal_ , because if he fell behind, if he got lost again…

Aziraphale did, and frequently. He got too attached, had lovers, even, far more often than Crowley did. Aziraphale, Crowley thought with a hint of bitterness, was _allowed_ to be attached.

Only they’d die in the end, of course they would, and Crowley would watch, over and over, as Aziraphale would become slightly more stuck in his ways, slightly more old-fashioned, because it was _difficult_ , all that change, Crowley knew it was, and because if you changed too much, too quickly, you stopped remembering. You let go.

And so Aziraphale clung to old clothes and customs, and, yes, an irritatingly large amount of old heavenly beliefs, because it was safe, it was familiar, it was honourable, even. And Crowley changed as often as he could, because there was an awful lot that he’d rather leave in the past and forget. Because he had to keep up appearances, had to fit _somewhere_.

Crowley glanced absently out the window. he wasn’t sure quite how long he’d been gone, this time round— time was funny Downstairs— but there would always be some little tweaks to make, be it to his flat or his haircut or even the set of his sunglasses. And it was exhausting, trying to keep up with it all, to change yourself at a time when you really needed familiarity, an anchor. And it would be so easy to give it up, to let time go its own way for a bit.

To have the 19th century all over again.

 

There was a _noise_ , suddenly, from somewhere in his flat, jerking Crowley out of his reverie. He carefully, quietly, twisted the bathroom door open with one soot-stained suit sleeve, blessing under his breath as he realised that his holy water, tucked in his safe, was right behind where the sound appeared to have come from.

But if Hell had wanted him dead, Crowley attempted to reason with himself, they wouldn’t have given his a new body first. Those took work. It was probably a stray cat, or something. Or maybe there hadn’t been a noise at all, and Crowley’s fried nerves were getting the better of him. Or maybe—

Crowley rounded the corner into his living room, as stealthily as he could manage, and walked straight into Aziraphale.

“ _Oh_ ,” said the angel, articulately, pulling Crowley into a hug. It was warm, and soft, and terribly familiar, and Crowley, suddenly painfully aware of his own dishevelled state and the stench of Hell that still clung to him, extricated himself with some difficulty.

They stared at each other for a moment. Aziraphale, in his current corporation, was a good few inches taller than him, and Crowley felt annoyed by this, in a petty, distant sort of way. He could sort it out later, he supposed, but it was like Aziraphale and his bloody shirts— they’d both know now. Deep down.

“Why,” said Crowley, wearily, “are you in my apartment, angel?”

Aziraphale fiddled with the edge of his god-awful woolly vest.

“I, ah, came to water your plants,” he admitted after a moment, chin raised in mild defiance.

Crowley blinked. He’d noticed that his plants had been looking well, yes, awaiting his return in a swathe of glossy, lightly trembling leaves, but had just assumed that his scare tactics had been more effective lately. And while Crowley did enjoy the ritual of watering his plants, it hadn’t particularly occurred to him that water might, actually, be rather important in their continued survival.

“Oh,” he said. Then, before he could think better of it: “thank you.”

Aziraphale’s answering smile was stupidly beautiful, and Crowley hated himself for noticing it.

“My dear boy,” Aziraphale said emphatically. “It’s dreadfully good to see you again,” he offered, and Crowley inclined his head awkwardly.

“Er. Yes. How long was I— you know— this time?”

“Seven months and twenty-six days,” Aziraphale replied automatically, and then looked rather sheepish about it. Crowley felt something, or rather, several somethings, uncurl tentatively in his chest: eight months wasn’t too long, was, by Hell’s standards, remarkably efficient, actually. And Aziraphale had kept count, actually counted the days, had— missed him?

“And you watered the plants for all of that?” Crowley asked, his miserably exhausted mind grasping onto the one concrete bit of information he’d been given.

“Well, I thought— it wouldn’t do for you to come back to a host of dead plants, and goodness knows the poor things could use some affection, after what you put them through, and well…” Aziraphale spread his fingers and gave a remarkably Gallic sort of shrug. One corner of Crowley’s mouth twitched up into a sort-of smile.

“Angel,” he said softly.

“My dear,” Aziraphale said again, and meant it, reaching forward to gently wipe a smudge of ash off Crowley’s jaw.

They ended up, somehow, huddled into a corner of Crowley’s large white sofa, the flat still veiled in multitudinous twilight greys. Crowley was pressed up as closely to Aziraphale as he could manage, his thin, pointy limbs clinging to Aziraphale’s warm curves, the wonderful vast realness of him, solid and steady and _there_ , slit pupils dilated under their dark lenses.

And Crowley realised, with a sudden jolt, quite how stupid he had been, with all his melodramatic self-pity, because of _course_ there was somewhere where he fit. Because he had someone who would water his plants for him while he was in Hell. Someone fussy, and pedantic, who clung desperately to decades gone by. Someone who he truly knew, and who truly knew him, even when he pretended not to to save face. A few thoughts spiralled slowly out across his half-asleep mind: of yins and yangs, of words he really ought to say, of agents and instruments. Crowley moved his fingers tentatively upwards, in the half-dark—well, it was never properly dark for him, he supposed— and gently, gently, intertwined his fingers with Aziraphale’s, soft and small as they were. Immaculately manicured, of course. Aziraphale, ever so slowly, squeezed back, and that was how Crowley fell asleep: fingers intertwined, in the arms of an angel, and with a terribly stupid smile on his face.

And in his sterile flat, in Aziraphale’s arms, Crowley was home.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! fic title is from Hypersonic Missiles by Sam Fender because i'm always here for a good love song about the end of the world & capitalism and series title is from the aeneid because i'm gay


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